WWE announcer Corey Graves recently appeared on an episode of the Kurt Angle Show podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including the storyline he had with WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle back in 2017 and how it was never revealed to him where the story was actually going.
Graves said, “Kurt, if you handed me a million dollar right now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what the hell the information ever was. They never told me. I don’t know what the payoff was ever going to be. I remember asking at the time, because it felt really random, and they said…Jason Jordan and I got hired at the same time. I took my medical exams in Pittsburgh, that’s when I met him, we were at UPMC for our pre-WWE medical screens and we’ve been fast friends ever since. I think that was sort of the reasoning behind it. I just remember being like, I don’t know what this means, I don’t know where it’s going, but I get to work with my friend and Kurt Angle, this is going to be awesome, I don’t care, but I have no idea what the plan was. No clue.”
Transitioning from FCW to NXT:
“To the best of my knowledge, it was very exciting, but it was also very uncertain. FCW versus NXT, it was two completely different systems, basically different worlds. FCW, we were sort of the redheaded stepchildren on this island down in Tampa hoping that maybe one of us someday would make a couple bucks. No one was making much money. I think we were all making five or 600 bucks a week, which was standard at the time, but not exactly a comfortable living. You train five days a week and you do these live events in front of 10, 20, 30 people four or five nights a week. I remember getting there and having a conversation with Seth Rollins who I knew from the independents at the time. I was like, ‘Dude is this WWE? My paycheck says WWE on it, but it just doesn’t feel anything like WWE.’ You know, I grew up watching it and I’m thinking to myself, I’m in England every few weeks wrestling in front of three or 4,000 people and now there’s 26 people for our TV tapings. It was absolutely not glamorous.”
“I think the goal when making the NXT changeover was to really overhaul the entire system and that was sort of Paul’s baby at the time. Triple H’s baby was developmental and he wanted to give us the best tools in the world to succeed and boy did we ever. There were certain holdovers. Obviously we still had Dusty Rhodes. We still had a lot of the same familiar faces from FCW coaching-wise. So there was a level of comfort. I know that a lot of us were just blown away by the facility, the Performance Center. The first time you stepped foot, wait a minute, we have a kitchen. In FCW, we had a microwave and you’d have about eight guys standing around in a semicircle waiting to heat up their food, and just just seeing the Performance Center and what it became. Then there was such an influx of talent where we saw a lot more of our friends from the independents coming in, whereas FCW there were a handful of us who were the quote unquote indie guys, but there were a lot of outsiders. Then NXT came and it was like, okay, everyone who we felt should be here was starting to get an opportunity. Not everybody stuck, but it was really cool to see all these different faces that were familiar and guys you knew wanted it and wanted to be there and cared about the business.”
You can check out the complete podcast below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
